Nokia 5630 XpressMusic: Comes With Music and N-Gage

It's not a smart phone but, for a music phone, it's quite smart. Nokia's latest XpressMusic handset has been outed as the 5630 XpressMusic, and, while we seldom find mid-range phones much more exciting than winning £2 on a Lotto scratch card, the 5630 has a couple of respectable instant wins.

The fact it runs on Symbian's Series 60 operating system (the same OS used on forthcoming Nokia flagship handset the N97) notwithstanding, the 5630 incorporates not only a 7.2Mbps HSDPA Internet connection for ultra-fast mobile downloads, but also HSUPA for 2Mbps uploading. For sharing high-resolution photos and videos with Flickr and Facebook on the go, this is a killer selling point.

But that's not all. Nokia wants you to play games on the phone too, so the N-Gage gaming platform has been incorporated. As the Nokia Conversations blog points out (with bonus bias towards all things awesome about Nokia, naturally), this is only the second non-Nseries handset to get Nokia's high-end gaming platform.

Other features include a 3.2-megapixel camera, twin LED flash, 3.5mm headphone socket (yay!), stereo Bluetooth, a 4GB microSD card for storing music, and, if it's anything like the 5800 XpressMusic (and it almost certainly will be), it'll support iTunes Plus music downloads.

The 5630 will also be sold as a Comes With Music device, offering bundled access to unlimited music downloads (more on what Comes With Music is about here).

Expect the phone to be on sale in the UK in spring, on pay as you go and pay monthly deals, and SIM-free with the Comes With Music service.